


Compact

by thedevilchicken



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alcohol, Anal Sex, Banter, Blow Jobs, Drinking, Drunk Sex, Episode Related, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Floor Sex, Light Angst, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Rimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 14:06:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6156061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Right now I could be shitfaced on rum on a warm beach instead of standing here with you," Vane said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Compact

**Author's Note:**

> Set immediately after XXIV, picking up from Flint and Vane talking on the deck of the Walrus after leaving Ocracoke, and assumes that the two of them can refrain from trying to kill each other for one night at the very least!
> 
> Flint/Vane in the foreground, with mentions of (past) Flint/Thomas, Vane/Teach and Vane/Eleanor.

The night wore on, a fair wind in the Walrus’s sails to carry them away from Ocracoke, a clear sky overhead filled up with familiar stars and a chill in the air that made Flint shrug his coat a little tighter about him as he stood there at the rail by the ship’s stern lantern. The faint whistle of the wind through the rigging and the break of the water against the hull had been the music of his life so far, he thought, to the point that their absence when on land had from time to time disturbed his sleep. Sometimes, he wondered if he’d slept more nights in berths on ships than in beds in houses, and he found ht preferred the sea whatever the statistics were. It had chosen him as much as he had chosen it. 

His companion there had also, in effect, chosen him. That part of it all seemed to him substantially less natural, a function of chance more than of design. He’d led his men to Ocracoke to find Charles Vane, though he’d half expected to find the point of a sword there instead, and now there they were, on Flint’s ship and not on Blackbeard’s beach, side by side in something not so very unlike a companionable silence. They had a plan, if not a good one. They had an understanding, if not a secure one. He hoped to see their compact last as long as the task required it to but still he would not have put his trust in Charles Vane for all the Urca gold and more besides had it not been necessary. It was necessary. 

“Right now I could be shitfaced on rum on a warm beach instead of standing here with you,” Vane said, his eyes still on the water as he spoke. “Teach has a bed right there on the sand though fuck knows where he got it from or how he ever gets it there. It’s got this carved wooden headboard, heavy as shit, big enough for three. I used to think about him and me and Eleanor all in it together.” He glanced sidelong at Flint just for a second then back to the sea with the faintest hint of a self-deprecating smile, not that Flint believed for a moment that Vane wallowed often in self-deprecation, or for long. “Seems like I gave up one for the other and somehow pissed off both in the end.”

“And look where you are now,” Flint said, dryly. 

Vane chuckled. “Yeah,” he said, and turned, spread his arms wide to the dark deck of the Walrus. Flint didn’t need to turn to know the scene he’d see, so he watched Vane’s amused expression instead and wondered idly how they’d come to this when it wasn’t so very long since they’d been at each other’s throats in a very literal sense. “Look where I am now. No rum, no sand, no sex. What the fuck did I let you talk me into?”

“Well, perhaps I can help with the first part before you fling yourself overboard and swim for Ocracoke,” Flint said. “Let’s get you a drink.”

It was technically Teach’s rum that Flint had there in his cabin, of course, or Vane’s since he was the one who’d brought it aboard back at the island they’d not long since departed. Vane hadn’t come with much in the way of gear or possessions because he’d had none to speak of, just the clothes on his back and his pistol and his sword, three bottles of rum in misty glass bottles thick enough to kill a man in one blow that he’d had Flint stow in his cabin so the crew wouldn’t get to them. Flint led the way down from the stern rail, quarterdeck to main deck as the men in the rigging and idling by the helm watched the two of them pass by, and he held the door for Vane who he supposed he should call his guest under the circumstances, in spite of all that had passed between them down the years. Then they sat themselves down at the table and Flint poured rum into two sturdy glasses, pushed one to Vane around the edge of the chart that was still laid out across the tabletop. Vane took the glass, held it, eyed it, then drained it in one swift mouthful and so Flint did the same, then he poured another round. 

They drank. Vane put his feet up on the table’s edge and they drank some more while Flint gave him a brief, pointed look and then _didn’t_ ask him to remove his feet from the table as if that made a point that they both understood but didn’t otherwise articulate. They spoke for a while as they drank, talked of their plans, of the Spanish intelligence of Nassau upon which Vane had so fortuitously chanced and how they might best use it, and then the conversation drifted. Vane spoke about Eleanor, ever more freely as the rum continued to flow. Vane spoke about Teach, of his mentorship, of his friendship, of loyalty he should have known better than to betray even for this, and Flint supposed he understood. He’d known betrayals of his own, after all. 

“When’s the last time you were drunk?” Vane asked, as he leaned forward to pour two more glasses. 

“It’s been a while,” Flint replied. “We _were_ chased through a storm, becalmed in the Sargasso and then held captive by an entire colony of escaped slaves, after all.”

Vane raised his glass with a trace of wry amusement to concede the point. Flint raised his glass to acknowledge Vane’s concession, rare as the occasion was. 

It _had_ been a while since Flint could say he’d last truly been the worse for drink. He had no inherent dislike for it, no puritanical moral objection to it, no requirement to abstain from it on health grounds and did not cling quite so tight to self-control that he couldn’t appreciate the allure of drunkenness from time to time, but it _had_ been a while. He could feel a familiar kind of warmth spread through his chest and his cheeks that only increased with each fresh glass, a warmth that spread out into his limbs till he felt closer to ease than he had at all in recent memory. Even after sleep he’d wake tense, take with a jerk and a sullen realisation that another day had just arrived. Perhaps it was only the effect of the sweet, dark rum but he had to admit - albeit only to himself - that he felt more hope then than he had in months. He had a purpose. He certainly didn’t like to think Charles Vane had played a part in that, at least no more than a knight in his strange chess game with the Empire. 

Vane left the table. He stood, perhaps a little unsteady on his feet with his half-filled glass of rum still in his hand, and he sauntered his way around the room as Flint watch him do so. He paused to look out from the cabin windows and over the ink-dark sea churning there in their wake, set the lanterns swinging from their moorings so the light tilted this way and that around the two of them, trailed his fingertips over the spines of the books secured there on their shelves. 

“Have you actually read all of these?” Vane asked, as he removed a book from the shelf. He leafed through it briefly with his one free hand, wrinkled his nose and then put it back in entirely the wrong place. Flint watched him do it without complaint; he’d just replace it later. 

“Yes, I have.” 

“I bet you think you’re smarter than everyone else on this ship,” Vane said, glancing at him as he picked up a second book and gave it the precise same treatment as he had the first, likely just to grate on Flint’s nerves. “Me included.”

“Well, the fact of being widely read hardly equals intelligence,” Flint replied, as he poured himself another drink. “But yes, when it comes to it, I do.”

Vane flashed him a smirk of a smile in the still swinging lantern light. “You’re probably right,” he said. “But don’t think for a second I don’t know when I’m being manipulated. It’s just that for the moment, we have the same goal in mind.”

“Nassau?”

Vane raised his brows. “What else?”

Vane threw back what remained of his run and returned to the table, leaning back against it just by Flint’s side to pour yet another glass from what was by then their second bottle. Then he hopped up onto the tabletop, sat there on the edge of Flint’s chart and while Flint watched, not quite sure how amused he would have been by it without the alcohol in him, Vane shuffled over and rearranged himself to dangle one foot either side of Flint’s knees, sitting there right in front of him, very near too close for comfort. He swung his legs as he sat there and Flint just shook his head at him. 

“You’re creasing my chart, Charles,” Flint said, with a near-teasing cluck of his tongue. 

Vane gave a rather expansive, somewhat drunk shrug. “And?”

“And I’d prefer not to lose it entirely to a drinking accident.”

Of course, he should have known better. He should have known better because Vane slipped down from the table, one foot hitting the boards either side of Flint’s calves, and he took a seat right there on his lap with one arm draped over Flint’s shoulder, his hand at the high back of the chair. He drained his glass again then leaned back, twisted, and quite deliberately, quite purposefully, set the empty glass on the middle of Flint’s chart. He supposed even if he’d done it just to irritate him, at least he wasn’t still sitting on it. 

“Better?” Vane asked, with a self-satisfied smile. 

“That depends on your definition of _better_ ,” Flint replied. “I suppose I don’t have to worry for my chart, at least.” 

Vane took Flint’s glass from his hand, finished off the contents on his behalf, then leaned back to place it right beside his own. Then he set both hands at the back of Flint’s chair, drumming the rings on his fingers against the ill-varnished wood of it. 

“So, how about you help me with that second part?” Vane said. 

“The beach?”

“The sex.”

“I think you’ll find that was the third part,” Flint said.

Vane shrugged. “So the third part, then.”

“Did you want me to find you a man like I found you the rum?”

“Here I thought this was a pirate ship. Do you always whore your crew like a brothel madam?”

“Not usually, no.”

“So just for me?”

“Call it special consideration for a fellow captain.”

“Call it horseshit.” Vane’s blunt nails raked over the short hair at the back of Flint’s head, down the back of his neck, making him shiver with it. “I’m nowhere close to drunk enough to fuck your crew.” He forced up Flint’s chin with his thumbs. Flint met his gaze. “How about it? Call it payment for tempting me away from paradise.”

Vane didn’t wait for an answer; he kissed him instead, leaned in, closed what very little distance there was left there between them and pressed his mouth to his. Flint didn’t react to it at all, didn’t move a single solitary muscle in response, not sure if he was frozen there in shock or in disgust or something else he didn’t much care to name as Vane’s rough hands cupped his cheeks, as Vane’s nails raked his neck, as Vane caught his bottom lip between his teeth and sucked for a second, hard. 

“You can do better than that,” Vane said, still so close his beard bristled against Flint’s, and then he sat back, brows raised. “Don’t tell me you’ve never done it with a man before. I won’t fucking believe you.” Flint watched him lean back in close, his stomach going tight, sinking, turning, as Vane’s mouth skimmed his jaw, as he sucked hard enough to bruise at the side of his neck. “When was the last time you took a man to bed?” He pulled aside Flint’s shirt collar just far enough that he could bite down sharply at his collarbone and make him hiss with it. “Was it anyone I know? How about your big bosun Billy Bones? If his looks could kill, you’d be dead as a goddamned doornail by now.” He moved up again, Vane’s nose and mouth and bearded cheek rubbing up against his neck, his jaw, nuzzling at the corner of his mouth, making his pulse race, making his breath stutter. “What about that bastard Silver? Maybe you like him more now he’s got a stump where his leg was. Maybe you get off on that shit.” He sat back and smiled archly. “Maybe it was before you even got here. Some Navy man? Some proper English gent?”

Flint stopped Vane’s mouth with his then, which he supposed had been the point of it all along. Flint kissed him, hard and hot with just a hint of desperation there mixed in it, his hands twisting tight into Vane’s long hair to hold him there except Vane’s hands were on him, too, and so it seemed unlikely that he meant to go anywhere else at all. One of Vane’s palms pressed down over the crotch of Flint’s trousers and Flint felt himself twitch hard at the touch, felt his cheeks flush hot as Vane worked open just enough of the buttons there to push his hand inside and wrap his fingers tight around him. He knew he should have stopped him. He knew he should have stopped himself. But his head was foggy with rum he should never have drunk, that tasted just like Vane’s mouth or perhaps vice versa, and then Vane pulled back abruptly, stood and dragged Flint up with him from his chair. He shouldn’t have offered the fucking rum in the first place but it was a little too late then for _shouldn’t_.

Vane pulled off his coat and draped it over a chair, pulled off his shirt and tossed it onto the table and it knocked over a glass whose escaping dregs would likely stain Flint’s map except then Vane’s mouth was back up at his neck and Vane’s hands were shoving at his trousers and somehow the chart’s importance seemed to diminish quite dramatically. Vane pushed Flint’s trousers down to his knees and went down too, put his hands on him, put his mouth on him, sucked him, teased him with the tip of his tongue till his breath caught and all Flint could do was shove him away, shove him down hard, to keep from coming right then and there in Vane’s hot mouth. 

Vane sprawled on his back, hit his head but he laughed with it and Flint followed him down, unable to keep himself from it or at the very least unwilling to do so. He spread himself out over him, his hard cock pressed up to the leather of Vane’s trousers; he held himself there with his palms pressed to the floor as he ducked his mouth to the crook of Vane’s neck and he bit and he licked and he sucked while Vane’s hands went under the back of his shirt, to the small of his back, down to the curve of his arse. Then Vane twisted hard under him and dumped him down onto his back, and all Flint could do was laugh breathlessly, hopelessly, drunk with it as much as with the rum. 

“Told you you could do better,” Vane said, straddling Flint’s thighs. He unbuckled his own belt and pushed down his trousers, shifted, twisted, shimmied and ultimately completely failed in the task at hand with a mutter of _fuck_ just underneath his breath and made Flint give a moment’s chuff of laugher. He stood then, and while Flint watched he pulled off first one boot and then the other, unsteady on his feet as he did it though whether that was from the rum or from his quite obvious arousal was certainly up for debate. Then he shoved down his trousers, kicked them off and stood there over him, barefoot on the dusty cabin floor, his hands on his hips, naked save the jewellery at his neck and at his fingers while Flint was still mostly clothed, except of course for his erection. It was fucking ridiculous. That fact did not seem to escape either of them. 

“Would you bolt the door, for the love of Christ?” Flint said, exasperated, and Vane smiled toothily as he walked across the room to do so. 

“Better?” he asked once the heavy bolt had clunked down into place. Flint fairly scowled in response. “Is there any oil in here? Don’t tell me you’ve got none. I'm not going to spit on your cock and hope for the best.” Flint didn’t have it in him to reply to that particular statement and so he just pointed across the room, pointed again when Vane got it wrong the first time, shook his arm in consternation as he pointed _again_ until Vane came back with shaving oil in a small, thick glass bottle that Flint supposed would do, paused then brought the rum with him, too. 

“You could have just said where it was,” Vane said as he went back down, straddling Flint’s bare thighs there on the floorboards. He unstoppered the bottle and spread oil over his fingers, poured some out over the tip of Flint’s cock and stroked it over him thickly, his grip tight as Flint kept himself firmly anchored to the floor against the urge to press into his hands. Then he reached his hand back and Flint watched him do it, knowing precisely what he was doing with his oiled-up fingers as he spread his knees wider and took a deep, shuddering breath. Vane was completely unashamed of it, completely and utterly unabashed by it as he worked his fingers up inside himself, as he oiled himself, as he stroked himself with his free hand like doing it all in front of Flint was the most natural thing in the world or perhaps just like he found perverse enjoyment in it like he did so many things. He squeezed the head of his cock and made himself groan, his head tilting back, his eyes drifting closed, no restraint in him at all, just like there had never been a need for there to be. Then he crawled forward. Then he took Flint’s straining cock in his hand and he guided it up against his hole. Then he sat up, he sat back, and he pushed Flint’s cock up inside himself, slowly, hotly, inch by inch. 

“Fuck,” Vane cursed, breathless, breathy, his thighs spread wide, knees against the cabin floorboards. He took a halting breath and chuckled it out unsteadily, reached for the rum and took a long, deep swig from it as he settled down on Flint's cock; he spilled it down his chin, dark as blood, and Flint reached up to rub it away with the back of his hand, licked it from his own skin before he’d even had a moment’s thought to stop himself. Vane smiled, amused, shook his head, upended the rum over Flint’s chest once he’d pushed his shirt up out of the way and bent in to lick it away and all the while, Vane’s hair trailing over his skin, the ends getting sticky with the rum, all Flint could think of was pushing Vane down on his hands and knees and tipping the rum over the small of his back, watching it run between his cheeks, watching it drip from his balls before he’d put his mouth there, his teeth at Vane’s back then his tongue at Vane’s hole, his fingers pushing inside him. He hadn’t done that in years. He hadn’t done that since Thomas and even then it hadn’t seemed even half as obscene, like some prurient fantasy sprung up to torment him with the notion of his mouth teasing at places on Vane that he'd never even thought about before that night. His head fucking swam with it, sick and tilting, as Vane started to ride him in earnest. He kept his hands away, not sure he could’ve made himself touch him even had he wanted to. He told himself he didn't want to.

Vane was right, of course. Perhaps Vane hadn’t exactly always been right in the past, but he’d been right about that, at least; Flint hadn’t had another man since he’d arrived there in Nassau, hadn’t had another man since that last time with Thomas, in London, before everything he’d had had been taken from him and Thomas long with it. He’d loved him dearly in spite of the law, in spite of Thomas’s marriage, in spite of God, so fiercely in fact that he thought sometimes that had it not been the very antithesis of all that Thomas had stood for in his life, he could have put a sword to every man who’d stood between them and taken him from that place, saved him, lived his life with him far away. But Thomas had always been too good, too idealistic, for the reality of New Providence. Flint knew Thomas would have balked at what his lover had had to become there. Better he never had to know. 

Vane was right: he hadn’t had a man in years, and he’d told himself he hadn’t wanted to. But there he was even so, balls-deep in a man he’d wanted dead more often than he’d wanted _him_. Vane leaned back, the angle of it seemingly impossible as he pumped his hips against him, as his breath came harshly, as he rode Flint’s cock hard and tight. Flint braced his bootheels against the boards to push up and meet him, made Vane groan with it, made Vane’s muscles go taut all through his neck and his chest and his abdomen and so he reached up, ran one hand over Vane’s throat, fingers catching at the cords he wore there, ran his hand down over his chest, fingers spread, raked him with his nails and made his gaze snap back to him, wrapped his hand around Vane’s cock and squeezed. The world didn’t end because he’d touched Charles Vane, surprisingly enough. Thomas wasn't there to be disappointed in him for it, nor Miranda.

“I wondered when you were going to put your fucking hands on me,” Vane said, flushed and amused. “I’m not a goddamned leper. My cock’s not going to fall off if you look at it the wrong way.” 

Flint snorted. “If your mind were half as active as your mouth, you’d be a danger to us all,” he said, and stroked him, his free hand squeezing tight at Vane’s thigh, and Vane just laughed at him breathlessly and rode him harder. Perhaps if Vane weren’t ashamed of it then he didn’t have to make himself be, either. 

The rest didn’t take long, clutching hard at each other, Vane leaning forward with his hands pressed up to Flint’s shoulders, Flint’s hand moving tight at Vane’s cock as they moved together in a sweaty, rum-soaked rhythm. Vane shoved up Flint’s shirt again and spilled over his belly with a shout that Flint muffled with his hand clamped over Vane’s mouth and then he tipped him onto his back, got back inside him with a groan he hadn’t known he had in him, Vane’s legs cinched tight around his waist as he watched him watch him buck and jerk and come inside him, so hard it very nearly hurt. Vane just seemed to find that fucking funny. 

Sex had always been so careful with Thomas, something slow that they’d savoured and he’d been glad of it at the time; when he pulled back out of Vane, he ached from head to toe despite all the alcohol in him, and not just from the knock-down fight he’d had with Teach earlier in the day. Vane looked disconcertingly like the cat who’d got the cream as he lay there, watching him. Apparently Flint wasn’t the only manipulator in the room; he could appreciate the irony in that. 

Vane sat himself up crosslegged on the floor and swept back his hair from his sweaty skin as Flint watched him, sitting back against one table leg, utterly dishevelled. Vane reached for the bottle and he drank again; when he came closer, on his knees, and pulled Flint to him by the front of his shirt, when he kissed him, his mouth was smoky-sweet with rum just the way Flint’s own was, two of a kind.

They dressed. They took their time, wiped themselves down with cloths and tucked in shirts, buckled belts, donned boots and coats, and when they went back out on deck into the dark and the cool breeze that whistled through the shrouds and stays, they went forward to the bow, up to the forecastle, instead of back to the stern. It seemed fitting somehow, the wind and the spray in their faces, looking forward instead of back. 

He knew he was going against everything he and Thomas had worked for, against everything they’d wanted for New Providence, against the country he’d served and the plan he’d helped to piece together into being that Woodes Rogers was even then attempting to enact so many years too late. Perhaps Thomas would have been ashamed of him for all he’d done, and perhaps Miranda had been too; perhaps Thomas would not have seen the man he’d loved in the man that he’d become; perhaps Thomas would have wanted him to stay the course and not delve down into revenge, but then Thomas had always been the better man. 

“Maybe next time _I’ll_ have _you_ instead,” Vane said, his voice low as they stood there leaning side by side at the rail. "Standing, maybe. Up against a bulkhead or over the desk and to the devil with that fucking chart." 

Flint quirked his brows at him. “Next time?”

“Next time.” A hint of a smile tugged at Vane’s mouth as he tapped his rings against the rail. “Assuming we don’t die tomorrow.”

“That’s a rather large assumption.”

“So call me an optimist.” 

Flint just smiled as he shook his head, and he looked out to the sea that lay ahead of them. 

He’d spent so much time longing for home over the years, looking back, wishing, resenting, hating England and yearning for it both together, yearning for the life he’d had, for the lover he’d lost. Now he knew for sure: Nassau was his home, the one he’d chosen for himself, the one that he’d had taken from him just as Vane had. Perhaps the night had been all wry amusement but beneath it all they’d both lost more than Flint much cared to articulate. That loss was something they shared, and that angered them both; it was keeping Flint alive, and had led Vane to betray the closest he had to a father, to a lover, to the kind of loyalty he'd likely never have again.

He didn’t need to trust Vane to want him, didn’t need to love him or even to like him much at all, likely didn’t need the rum to want him, either. All he needed was to know the man Vane was, the nature of him that had always been quite plain to see, the things he could be trusted to do and the reasons for which he could be trusted to do them. They’d tried to kill each other and just barely failed in the attempt. They’d tried to save each other and got there only by the skin of their teeth. But if nothing else, the two of them together made a force that Woodes Rogers would be wholly wrong to underestimate because as much as Flint had wanted to believe they were nothing alike, had nothing in common, weren’t even as close as two different sides of a coin, he shared more with Vane then than he had ever shared with the man he’d loved. Their common ground began with an island someone else meant to rule, but whose very beating heart lay in the two of them.

They were settled to their purpose, there in the spray at the bow of Flint's ship. They’d take back Nassau or they'd make damned sure there was absolutely nothing left for England there to take from them; they’d take it back or they’d die trying. 

Perhaps their strange compact would not see out the month, but they were going home because of it. He could trust Vane in that, at least.


End file.
